Sunday, March 25, 2012

Zoe Strauss Introduction

I'm assuming that each of you will read the Xerox copy of the introduction that Zoe Strauss wrote about the I95 project to accompany her mammoth book and the huge show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

You might borrow a copy and return it after a few days....or read it in class. (WHICH LEADS ME TO THE FACT THAT YOU MUST HAVE WORK TO DO IN CLASS, ALL CLASS...and not forget some important gadget or whatever, please, or leave class early. It ends at 5.)

We'll discuss her writing next week. I admire this piece and am particularly interested in your take on why she conceived of this enterprise as taking ten years. I imagine that's a hard concept for students in a university who are taking 4 or 5 subjects, at least one of which is a studio course, and taking 20 rolls of film or 500 digital pictures a semester. I, on the other hand, find it a remarkable and refreshing way of planning a long-term adventure.

And I'm interested in what categories you might chose to photograph if you were to start on such a project...how would you think that out.

And I'm interested in your general ideas/reactions/thought.....about what she wrote, her "everything," the additions she thought necessary for the final project, the difference between and the definitions of the intuitive and the intellectual decisions she has been constantly making.

I had originally hoped you would read her blog, but that's not really necessary since so much was about the show. However, she had a good entry with a photo of herself in a hoodie and a discussion of whether she, a small, 41-year-old-white=woman would have been shot by George Zimmerman if she'd been walking through the enclave where he was a Neighborhood Watch captain carrying a gun!

I hope I don't need to say that if you have chosen to work in the darkroom, you are buying your 20 rolls of 36 exposure film, developing it, cutting it down, making contacts, choosing what to print......making a work print, looking at it with other work prints and then making final prints of what you've chosen. THAT IS MUCH, MUCH, MUCH MORE TIME CONSUMING than taking digital photographs...

so if you're working with digital, you have to take many, many, many more images...and use many, many more in your project. You have not gotten your hands wet, so to speak, and had a far easier time of it, in so far as taking interesting, insightful photographs can ever be easy.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera when I was walking the dogs past a stick structure someone made in a park near Target, sticks bent in half to create the illusion of a roof. Here it is after a wind storm.

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"My Suffolk Downs" was just published by Pressed Wafer and Kat Ran Press, photographs and poems. A chapbook, "The Real Story," can be ordered at www.finishinglinepress.com. I've been doing a great deal of community work, short videos (29 so far, and photographs during the last year in Chelsea and in Lawrence.
I was a photographer for a thousand years, specializing in personal work, documentary. Now I write and work in video with a few photographs thrown in on the side. My website is www.melissashook.com